Back when it was becoming clear that the time of the BeOS had come and gone, enthusiasts immediately set up the OpenBeOS project, an attempt to recreate the Be operating system from scratch, using a MIT-like license. The project faced difficult odds, and numerous times progress seemed quite slow. Still, persistence pays off, and the first alpha release is drawing ever closer. We decided to take a look at where Haiku currently stands.

I have been diving into Haiku big time for the last two weeks. The only major problem I presently have is that Haiku will not support my USB speakers.

I am looking at the code right now to see if I can fix the problem myself.

The other problem with handling the filesystem seems to go away if I breakup the key files into diffirent folders. If I can get a handle on why I will file a bug report.

However, while BeOS works fine on my sub-1GHz machines, Haiku really seems to what the faster to machines to fly. Not that it does not work on my 550 P-III machine, but you will notice the diffirence compared to running BeOS on the same hardware (Bootman is great).

I have had no problems installing the downloaded Haiku images using BeOS, but I get shivers down my spine trying to imagine what a Windows/Mac/Linux user goes thru moving said image to a disk partition. And VMware slows it down too much on the hardware I have to show the OS's true power.

As soon as Haiku goes Alpha with a boot CDROM image I expect a lot of people to be impressed.

Anyway, I suggest that anyone who wants to try it out go to HaikuWare.com so they can get an image with lots of sample apps.